It is estimated that around 16% of university students in the UK are taking ‘smart drugs’, medication available on prescription for conditions such as Alzheimer’s, that are now being used by healthy people to enhance memory, concentration and other cognitive abilities. Neither is it just students who are popping the pills, but their lecturers and a swathe of professionals eager to achieve that extra edge. Smart drugs inspired this year’s Hollywood film Limitless, with the tagline, ‘One pill. Anything is possible’. The scale of their use has also caused the UK’s leading expert on ‘cosmeceutical’ brain treatments, Barbara Sahakian, to speculate that students might soon have to take part in pre-exam drug tests to prevent wide-spread ‘cheating’.

Although some are now taking pills to cram more memories in, others are looking forward to a time when they can wipe them out. Investigations into the nature of post-traumatic stress disorder have discovered certain ‘amnesia’ drugs can block, dilute and even delete unwanted and unhappy memories. Once again, drugs originally used to treat disease, in this case high blood pressure and heart disease, might now be used to dull the pain of traumatic events – a discovery culturally imagined in another Hollywood film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The turn towards ‘cosmetic neurology’, a new term for the the use of drug treatments by people without disease to enhance or disable normal cognitive abilities, marks an important shift in medicine and raises difficult questions about their use. Does a move towards enhancement mark a new ethical terrain in the project of human improvement? Should we fear the use of such drugs by governments to control troublesome populations, for example? How do memories, or their lack, shape who and what we are? Can and should we distinguish between enhancement and ‘therapeutic forgetting’? And what does the bid to remember and forget say about us as a society?